\”I\” before \”E\” except after \”C\” and when sounding for \”A\” as in \”neighbor\” and \”weigh.\” So where does that leave us?

My post with the suggestions for recurring blog features elicited one (verbal) vote for movie reviews and one (electronic) vote for a webcomic, so I started focusing my attention on the disparate shreds of my novel, just to be perverse. This isn’t working out so well.

Some writers cannot be creative when their lives are stressful; some can’t write at all when they are the least bit uncomfortable. I have this pattern of becoming creative under duress, then losing interest in my projects when the pressure is off. My mostly unwritten novel is a prime example.

How It Started

I worked for the Wal-Mart Portrait Studio (managed at that time by Portrait Corporation of America, International, which has since gone bankrupt) for almost a year. I lasted longer than all of my co-workers and several of my superiors. I tolerated insane scheduling, inconsistent standards of conduct, squealing squirming brats and their children, the debris left in the wake of the single least competent human being I have ever known, pointless day-long excursions to the armpit of California, the holiday rush, unwanted attention from men older than my father, low wages, every strain of cold and flu that a drafty grungy public environment can foster, and Wal-Mart management. Then my new manager introduced herself by grabbing my shoulders and shaking me, calling me “Honey” and saying, “We’re going to be such good friends!” Time to go. I found greener pastures fairly easily (most common groundcover options are greener than straight manure) and informed my manager. PCA didn’t acknowledge my resignation until I’d been at my new job for two months, but they did make my final work week eight days long, including the weekend before the first Monday at my new job.

In the midst of all of this I, a lucid dreamer for most of my life, lost the ability to remember my dreams. I’d wake up with the idea that I’d imagined something strange and wonderful, and only the vaguest idea of what it might have been. Lying awake in the morning (work didn’t start until 10 AM and I was going to bed early and not sleeping well), I would try to reconstruct these forgotten ideas. And somehow this process generated a plot.

From my creative writing journal*
The main character is an undergraduate assisting a quantum physicist of dubious talent. The physicist has a time machine which he did not build (though everyone takes it for granted that he did, until later). As with any marvel of technology, after he’s worked out the kinks (mostly), secured the patents and considered all of the obvious possibilities (find out for certain what really killed the dinosaurs, assassinate Hitler, stop yourself from assassinating Hitler because the alternative is even worse, etc.), he uses it to pick up chicks. Mr. Undergraduate has the same idea, but because he’s young and clumsy and hopelessly infatuated with his matronly lesbian English professor, it doesn’t work for him. That, and he encounters something unfathomably scary lurking in the creamy center that bonds the two cookie-halves of Space and Time. His uncontrolled experiments have a devastating effect on the fabric of the universe, but centuries will pass before it becomes noticeable. Meantime, Undergrad is quietly disturbed and loudly frustrated, and seeks to drown his troubles in watery booze and pounding music. He encounters to women at the club. One is vaguely familiar, highly elusive and somewhat menacing. The other plays the damsel in distress and then the grateful young nymph in a way that could only convince someone in Undergrad’s state of mind. She lures him toward a whirlwind romance (he thinks) or a rendezvous with destiny (she thinks), but then Undergrad hits something (or someone) with his car. Barbie drops her facade and coldly, warningly tells him to just keep driving. Undergrad’s natural curiosity, kindness and recent reaffirmation of his ability as a fighter prompt him to go out and investigate. He finds only a dent in his front bumper and some gouges in the asphalt, and when he returns to the car, Barbie is gone. Nothing much happens for a while after that, except that uniform vacuous spherical anomalies– bubbles– begin to appear in walls, boulders, cattle, trucks, trees, people; and Undergrad can’t shake the feeling that he’s being followed. The shadow lady from the club keeps turning up in his peripheral vision, parked in the alley behind the cafe where he works, in the hallways between classes, in the bushes outside his bedroom window, interrogating him at knife-point in his dreams. One night she is really there, not threatening but frightened and demanding to know why he is being targeted. He’d like to ask her the same thing. Under questioning, he admits to using the time machine, just a little bit, once. Shadow is satisfied that this is the answer but disappointed by its implications. Barbie returns just about then, with a few friends and some diabolical machinery, to retrieve Undergrad by tearing apart the dorm or the Earth if necessary. Shadow comes to the rescue with a device that can freeze time for a couple of minutes (longer than that and the user overheats), enough time to get to Undergrad’s car. They start driving toward the lab as soon as the freeze ends. Shadow is from a future dominated by a malevolent five-dimensional creature that got its start in Undergrad’s time. Barbie and co. are minions of that creature, tasked with finding a person from Undergrad’s time who has access to a time machine and would not cause any earth-shattering reactions by vanishing, to act as a conduit allowing the creature to participate in the physical universe. Shadow intends to prevent all of this by stopping the invention of the time machine. To this ind, Shadow and Undergrad backtrack to just before Dubious Quantum Physicist’s historic first launch. They find, not a rough prototype, but a finished machine, ergo, DQP didn’t invent time travel so much as discover it, in the lab of a colleague who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Specifically, DQP sabotaged the machine to make Colleague disappear. Colleague was deposited, alive but not at all well, into the space between dimensions. Her attempts to re-assert herself in the physical realm have resulted in unexplained bubbles, disturbing apparitions to careless time-travelers, and religious devotion from the likes of Barbie. Undergrad pieces this together just as Colleague reaches out, gets a grip on reality, and flips Undergrad, Shadow, DQP and Barbie into the unknown, a dimension of time and space, but also of mind. The surreal landscape is Barbie’s heaven, Shadow’s hell, Undergrad’s purgatory and DQP’s undoing. Undergrad finds and exit and drags Shadow through it. They land some distance apart. Undergrad is near a familiar road and tries to flag down a car– his car– but in the moments before the crash, he can’t see himself in the driver’s seat and the driver can’t see him. Shadow grapples with Barbie and comes out on top, but can’t stop Undergrad from making contact with his own dying self. To her surprise this does not result in a universe-shattering paradox, but Undergrad-1 absorbs Undergrad-2, including some of his memories. Shadow can’t explain this, but it gives her an idea as to how to defeat Colleague. They head back to the lab and, after a final multi-sided confrontation with Barbie and DQP in which some loose ends are tied, extraneous characters slaughtered and hidden motives revealed, Shadow and Undergrad travel a rough road to the time just before Colleague’s fateful journey. Their appearance only serves to convince Colleague that the time machine is a success, but then human-Colleague locks eyes with monster-Colleague. They come together in a way that demands a roaring subliminal light show in the film adaptation, and then Undergrad and Shadow are catapulted into Undergrad’s proper time. Only Shadow and Colleague can remember any of it. Knowing what she does, Colleague has kept the time machine a total secret and worked on it with extreme caution. As a result, DQP is just an obscure state university professor considering a career change, and Undergrad is an ordinary student. Shadow is apparently stuck in this time period because she had more of an impact here than in her own time. She is uneasy about the prospect of spending the rest of her life in this uncharted territory, but then she bumps into Undergrad and they get along famously. The end. Yeah.

I scrawled that out over the course of two nights in June, and thought, “Hey, NaNoWriMo is just a few months away– this would be perfect.” I started writing character bios, mulling over the finer points of the plot and setting, and thinking of what kind of research I would need to do to make the central conceit seem anything but ridiculous. And I had every intention of doing that research, but…

Life Refuses To Get In the Way

But then I started settling into this new job with reasonable hours, good pay and a relaxed environment, and I made a friend with whom I could talk for hours at a time, and suddenly my knitting and my new guitar seemed infinitely more interesting than the curious adventures of Undergrad and his motley crew. By the time the reminder e-mail from the NaNoWriMo team arrived (mid-October), I had all but forgotten my rough plans. At the reminder, I sidled on up to the NaNoWriMo forums and casually asked a few basic research questions. And the veteran Wrimos, with the utmost tact and clarity, explained why parts of the story having nothing to do with time travel/new-agey claptrap, would not work the way I imagined them. And with a week to spare, I couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm for the old plot to even try to save it; instead I tried to make up a new plot.

In Misery, Stephen King includes a discussion of the difference between having an idea and getting an idea– one is practically effortless, a gift from the writer’s subconscious; the other is a long hard slog through the mud in pursuit of a dubious prize. I had ideas for the old plot; I had got ideas for the new plot. I came up with a young adult crime story, with a few characters reminiscent of those from the old plot, and a riff on the hero’s journey motif (a la Bless the Beasts and Children) thrown in for good measure. I did my preparation by the numbers: standardized character sheets, plot divided into thirty neat points so that I’d have something to write about each day. Despite multiple admonitions, I figured I wouldn’t need to plan my setting extensively, since the story concerned modern people in a place similar to my own home. And so November arrived.

Pressure! Panic! What have I done?

Here is a sampling of what I did that month. I tried to write what I had set out to write; really I did. Unfortunately I was bored with these consciously manufactured ideas before I even started writing about them. Only when I wrote outside the parameters I had set for my novel– a short story about my battle with my personified internal editor, several scenes which I had not originally put into my plot outline, elucidations on a new and completely unrelated plot– did I feel inspired by my writing. I wrote 50,000 words that November. In mid-December, I made a copy of the document and edited out everything that was not related to my main plot. That left 13,000 words. I haven’t added to it. I have tucked those surplus ideas away for future use.

And So On

Weeks passed, and with them the exhilaration and exhaustion of November. Life was decent and I didn’t feel like writing.

On December 29th, my best friend sent me an e-mail to say that we shouldn’t hang out anymore. A week after that, Uncle Mike (my first cousin once removed, whose first name was David) was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. He died while I was house-sitting in a blizzard. My great aunt died a week after his funeral, and my least offensive uncle’s mother passed the week after that. Old family wounds re-opened. My company almost went under. I dreaded coming home. I lost sleep.

I came up with several more plots.

It’s true spring now. The sun is out and life is level. I made new friends and I’ll be vacationing in Jamaica next month– which happens to be the month before Script Frenzy. I have half a dozen plots waiting in the wings. I hope I don’t spontaneously come up with any new ones for a while yet.

* I have a diary for intense personal stuff that I need to hash out but don’t want to share, a creative writing journal for hastily written plot summaries and poetry, a dream journal for assistance with the occasional aforementioned memory lapses, and this blog for stuff that I want to share but can’t really work into casual conversation. They all get updated at about the same rate.
Out-of-context quote of the moment:

As you may or may not have gathered from previous posts, I am somewhat addicted to BlogThings. I have their listing of new quizzes bookmarked, and I tend to drift on over there whenever I’m in the mood for a little pop psychology or other mindless fun. New this week:

Your Love Type: INTJ

The ScientistIn love, you tend to be very private and withdrawn – even when things are going well.For you, sex is important in a happy relationship. Less important when things aren’t going well.Overall, you are confident, intelligent, and serious about commitment.However, you tend to hold back and not show your emotions.Best matches: ENFP and ENTP

(“Pardon me,” says the reader who also knows a bit about my personal life, “but why did you take the love type test?” It was there and I was bored. Shut up.)

With the exception of the sex bit (which is outside of my experience) and the assertion that I am “confident,” the results seemed pretty accurate. To those unfamiliar with the four-letter designations used in the results, the quiz is based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the most popular test of its kind historically and today.

The questions and format of this particular quiz seemed familiar; I had taken a BlogThings quiz based on the MBTI on a previous occasion. After a brief search, I found that other quiz and re-took it. The same person assembled both of the quizzes, I took them within a few minutes of each other, and…

You Are An ISTJ

The Duty FulfillerYou are responsible, reliable, and hardworking – you get the job done.You prefer productive hobbies, like woodworking or knittings.Quiet and serious, you are well prepared for whatever life hands you.Conservative and down-to-earth, you hardly ever do anything crazy.

…I got a different result, which was also fairly accurate, if only by dint of being superficial. But why the difference? What exactly do sense and intuition mean to these people, anyway? I googled INTJ and ISTJ and compared notes.

INTJ:

pragmatic

perfectionist

imaginative

reliable

knowledgeable

self-confident

private

impassive

“idea people”

ISTJ:

dutiful

punctual

taciturn

“grim determination”

establishmentarian

strong sense of propriety

Working backwards from these lists of traits, I could conclude that I am ISTJ in those hours between midnight and my first cup of coffee, INTJ the rest of the time. Yet the MBTI is supposed to classify one’s psychological makeup in stark, rigid terms. Clearly, I needed a bigger sample.

A little more googling turned up at least a dozen sites offering free online versions of the MBTI (told you the thing was popular), most of which I took. The first two pasted me neatly within the INTJ category– so neatly that I thought of stopping there. Fortunately for the cause of science, I kept going, and the next such test declared that I was, not INTJ nor ISTJ, but ISTP. So not only had I confounded the Intuitive/Sensing dichotomy, but the Judging/Perceiving one as well.

All the tests I had taken thusfar consisted of a series of questions with two answers each, and displayed the results in the cut-and-dried four-letter format which I had come to think of as the standard. Standard or not, I thought this test displayed the results in a much more satisfying way, showing how many points went to each trait and indicating evenly split scores with an X (I came out IXTJ). This other test has a similar, even more detailed way of displaying the results, and the questions are presented as statements with which the test taker may agree or disagree on a five-point scale. Taking the results of these tests and others as an aggregate, I’ve found that I am

100% Introverted/0% Extraverted

50% iNtuitive/50% Sensing

75% Thinking/25% Feeling

50% Judging/50% Perceiving.

Depending on the test, I could be classified INTJ just as easily as INTP, ISTP or ISTJ.

Conclusions:

I’m very introverted and I tend to operate on ideas more than emotions. Anybody could have told you that.

Sometimes I obtain information/draw conclusions via conscious processes, and sometimes things just click. Call it inconsistancy or flexibility; it works for me even if it doesn’t work for Jung.

When you’re a world-famous psychologist, you can spell “extrovert” any way you want.

MBTI provides a fun way to spend an afternoon and an interesting angle on your self-image, but you probably shouldn’t use it to plot your career path or choose your spouse.

Let me start by saying how much I appreciate all that you’ve done for me over the years. You have supported me through good times and bad. You stuck with me day and night after the biopsy. Even on my worst days, you were always there to lift me up. For this and more, I owe you a debt of gratitude that I can only begin to express.

I am afraid, Bra, that recent events have changed my opinion of you. More to the point, I fear that you have changed from the friend I once knew, to something terribly crass and opportunistic.

Oh Bra, if you could only comprehend the pain that this change has caused me! It’s worse than that time you lost control of your underwire and stabbed me in the ribs.

Please know that my words, though harsh, are meant only to alert you to the danger in which you have placed yourself, and perhaps save the relationship that you and I have cultivated. I only hope that you will turn back from your whoring ways and be my friend again. I really don’t want to switch to a corset.

The question comes up most often at social functions, when I’m with my family meeting people who are not my family. Sometimes it’s the first thing they say to me. Sometimes they’ll talk about other things for a while, looking me up, down and sideways the whole time, trying to work out the answer for themselves first. Occasionally, some blessed soul will manage to resist the urge to ask, but such a person is rare indeed.

“What are you?”

An odd question, a rude question, a stupid question, the only question I know that encourages ignorance instead of dispelling it. I have the perfect response,

Human, female. What the hell are you?

but I never use it, because I’m (trying to be) a patient, understanding person and I don’t like to use the hell-word outside of religious discussions. Aside from that, if I answered that way, the idiot asking the question would first laugh mechanically, and then say,

“But seriously, what are you?”

I am a great granddaughter.

My great grandmother came from Germany and brought my grandfather across the country in a covered wagon.

My other great grandmother was a Mexican Indian who scraped and struggled and didn’t quite manage to raise all of her children.

My other other great grandmother was the quintessential Mexican. She had a Catholic upbringing, spoke mostly Spanish and made her own tortillas. I knew her briefly when we were both very small. Her skin was as white as what was left of her hair.

My other other other great grandmother was an all-American mutt.

“So, what does that make you?”

I am brunette.

My mother is “Latino.” She makes tacos from my Caucasian grandmother’s recipe and speaks even less Spanish than I do.

My father is “White.” His skin is darker than mine.

“Now you’re just being difficult. Who do you think you are?”

My name is Naomi.

It’s biblical, Hebrew in origin, and in that language it is usually pronounced NAY-ah-mee and means “pleasantness.”

My parents have always pronounced my name nay-OH-mee, which is Japanese for “above all, beauty.”

Roughly half of the people I’ve met persist in pronouncing it NYE-OH-mee, which means “I have a speech impediment and I don’t even know it.”

I share a middle name with Victor Hugo for some reason.

I’m not trying to make some grand eloquent point about race relations, globalization, the human condition or the true meaning of tolerance. I’m just bemused that I live in a society where I can be pigeonholed while simultaneously defying categorization.

Also, I think dividing the tribes on Survivor by race is nothing but an empty ploy to garner attention for a show that doesn’t deserve it. You want to make Survivor interesting? Three words:

The vast majority of MySpace users join the site as a way of connecting with old friends and making new ones. Then they leave the site because these connections inundate them with “too much drama.” Go figure.

Essentially, your ability to build and maintain friendships on MySpace depends on your ability to do so in real life. If you talk to people, they will talk to you, and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make– or something along those lines. MySpace provides four methods of communication: comments, e-mail (“private” messages), bulletins, and message boards.

Comments are messages that are visible to everyone who looks at your profile. By default, they can contain HTML (allowing people to embed images, movies, sounds, or stupid things that screw up your layout), but you can change your settings to accept only plain-text comments and let you moderate the comments you receive. Comments are limited in size. You can receive comments while you are signed off, even if you only accept messages when you are signed on. You can leave comments on a user’s profile or on the files that they upload (pictures, videos, blog entries, and in the case of bands, sound files), but if the user removes that file, all of the comments on it disappear. Most users communicate almost exclusively through comments, and many measure their self-worth by the number of comments they receive each day.

E-mail on MySpace is similar to other types of web-mail, but a little less user-friendly and considerably less secure. Messages are typed in a text box. You can include HTML, but you have to create the tags manually and you cannot preview the message before it is sent. It is fairly easy to send the same message twice, or fail to send a message after several attempts, without realizing it. Whether you quietly accept this or throw a hissy fit is up to you.

Bulletins are a waste of time. Nobody reads them. Your home page has a bulletin space that shows the five most recent bulletins your friends have posted, but this disappears once your friend count reaches one thousand. At the bottom of each bulletin is a link allowing the reader to delete the writer from the reader’s friend list, so posting bulletins is a great way to lose those few dear friends who actually take the time to read bulletins. If you post too many bulletins in a short period of time (“bulletin spam”), you may lose the ability to post a bulletin more than once every few hours. Bulletins can include HTML.

Message boards can be public or “private.” MySpace has its own extensive set of moderated message boards, and each group has its own message board that is moderated (or not) by the users who run the group. A message board is only as fun and useful as the people who post to it, so your results will vary.

As indicated above, you can also upload various types of files for your friends (and total strangers) to see. However, very few people will know that you’ve uploaded something new unless you tell them.

One last point: individual features of MySpace go offline even more often than the site as a whole; this applies especially to e-mail. Your real friends won’t mind exchanging phone numbers.

Next up: crass commercialism, or, free advertising that is worth every penny.

The bad news: Red Heart Super Saver is significantly thicker than DK/sport-weight yarn, bears annoying inconsistencies (broken strands, knots, etc.) for no apparent reason, and has a dull, lint-loving appearance that becomes especially pronounced over large areas worked in a dark color. The good news: apparently there’s a full-service yarn shop in the next town over, and barring that, I found a discount yarn internet store that has giant spools of DK alpaca on clearance. A pound of spun ruminant shavings– I could make the scarf and a sweater to go with it. Or not. My yarn budget is a bit more flexible of late (now that I have, you know, money), but I just don’t have the storage space for dozens of exotic fibers in a rainbow of colors.

My mother wants me to move southward and marry a nice bioengineer to appease my late grandmother, or something. Sometimes it’s like she’s speaking in code. She’s developed this fetching new habit of saying, “What I’m trying to say is…” and stopping right there. It makes our conversations very interesting– a sliding puzzle composed entirely of sound and pheromones– but I had a bit less than four hours of sleep last night and I’m just not in the mood for puzzles.

My aunt and cousin (one of two aunt-cousin pairs with whom my immediate family is still on speaking terms) are coming to see us next week, allegedly. Mom asked if I’d mind if she tried to mate my cousin to a guy we know. She was probably just trying to create a hook for the rest of our conversation, but maybe not. It’s none of my business, but it’s none of her business either, and I hope she just lets it go.

Note to self: When you are fifty, resist the urge to start playing matchmaker with your adult child’s friends. Remember when your mother’s best friend tried to hook you up with that creepy older guy who used to hang around with her fourteen-year-old daughter? That’s why.